The Vegetable Girl

Today during my lunch break I went into one of those incredibly expensive salad bars in Leicester Square to snaffle some sugar sticks. The whole place was full of beautiful women eating Caesar salads at a rate of about four molecules at a time, their hands cupped against their chins as they talked so that they could protect their Prada outfits while they chewed with their mouths open, spewing unflagging afternoon nothings from their mouths in carefully bred Islington lilts.


I reached the desk without anyone noticing my alien presence, but with no sugar sticks in sight instead found myself alone with a great glass display case. Bending over it, I saw that it contained strange and tempting concoctions of bizarre fruit and vegetable combinations whittled down into bite-sized portions on shining white plates. Prising the glass open at the bottom, I slipped my hand in and began to work my way across to a passionfruit-based dish but could not reach it because of the great expanse of china on which it lay.


Something grabbed my hand: I turned up my eyes to meet the glare of the girl behind the display. She pulled me along the width of the back of the shop and through the little half-door that separated counter and shop floor, with me unresisting and thinking of an excuse, and finally she pulled me through a little curtain and we were in the darkness of the kitchens behind the shop. There we faced each other, and I looked her fully in the face for the first time; I mean to say, I became sexually aware of her in the manner one does when one sits next to a girl on a train.


In the shaft of light from beyond the curtain I could see the streaks of crusted makeup that formed when she smiled, and her homely brown skin and her arms that were hairy like a spider’s legs. Her black eyes shone perhaps eight inches below mine, although she would have probably been my age or older. She brought her red doll-lips towards mine, her Hispanic features long and ethereal in the flat square of light we stood in, and I was just thinking “fuck this, it was only a salad” when she whispered in my ear ‘let me show you something’. She brought her face back in front of mine
and I saw that her lips and her eyes trembled slightly.


She walked past me and opened a small cabinet nailed against the wall, above which was scrawled on the wall, ‘la columna rota’. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness I began to make out what it was that was moving around. In the box there writhed the head, arms and torso of a girl, who appeared to consist entirely of fruit and vegetables. Her hair was made up of lettuce leaves, her fingers were flailing strips of cucumber and celery, and her lips were formed by passionfruit. The girl reached in to the box and cut a carrot areola from the dark skin, and the vegetable girl began to cry. But the tears blossomed as flowers from her red tomato eyes and we were captivated by the loveliness: the flowers of things that do not blossom are always vividly beautiful, like dreams made of stone.


We stood there and watched while she twisted in narrow anguish; silently, because they had taken her tongue for a gherkin and by the stump one could tell that it was just beginning to grow back. We stood there and watched, because even empathy can be overwhelmed by something when it is entirely beautiful.